


Encounter With A Rainbow

by abirdwhowritesthings



Category: Original Work, Plastic Tree
Genre: Ferris Wheel, Japan, Multi, Other, Romance, Sad, Song Lyrics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-02
Updated: 2015-04-02
Packaged: 2018-03-20 22:23:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3667428
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/abirdwhowritesthings/pseuds/abirdwhowritesthings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I fell in love with Daikanransha, the giant Ferris Wheel in Odaiba. This is probably the most romantic thing I have ever written. The lyrics interspersed throughout the story are from Plastic Tree's song "Replay" which was a huge inspiration for writing this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Encounter With A Rainbow

It was a night that carried the scent of fresh rain. The sky was black as charcoal; city lights blinded even the stars. I was not expecting anything to be brighter than those lights. Then, for the first time, I saw you.

You were a burst of hue amidst the shining monochrome; a great ring of every colour in the rainbow, spinning. I stared in awe for long moments until the bus sped past and my view of you was obstructed by buildings, but every now and then I was able to catch a glimpse of your aura between them.

It would be almost two months before I saw you again, but your memory made an imprint in my mind that night, and I knew it was our fate to meet someday.

最終便の観覧車―――――。  
(It's our last chance for the ferris wheel.)

I, a girl with a shy but ambitious heart, and you, the glowing, giant wheel that cleaves the sky. I approached you full of anticipation; with each step I took your colours shone more brightly. You grew from the glowing rainbow in the distance to a colourful god looming before my eyes. Only while standing at your feet like a mere insect did I realize your stature and that your name, "Giant Sky Wheel," did you no justice.

Stepping into a red gondola, gently rocking on its hinges, I took my first look at the world around me the way you would see it. Already we were quite far above sea level, and I could barely imagine what it would be like to view the scenery from the pinnacle.

With the closing of the gondola's door, we were shut off from the world. Confined and contained, but it was a safe feeling rather than a frightening one. Your windows became my eyes; my eyes became your heart. And together, slowly, ever so gracefully, we began to fly.

君と僕が夜に浮かんでく。  
(You and I are floating into the night.)

When we began our slow but steady climb, the night sky warmly welcomed us. Still a black void, it was not the sky I paid attention to but the world opening out below. The colours of the city seemed to take on a life of their own as they twinkled with artificial daylight.

It was not due to the pace that I never got the chance to see everything you showed me; indeed, we moved so slowly that at times I felt we were not moving at all, only for the gradual diminishing of people and cars far below us. There was simply so much to take in that neither my eyes nor my mind could comprehend in time.

Separated from the world by a small, warm capsule of windows, if I pressed my face to the glass and looked with an open mind, it would feel as though I was being lifted into a dark heaven by the arms of an angel. And an angel you were, in a sense. On that final night I was able to delude myself with the notion that our existence together would be remembered by everyone.

星空とパノラマの街の光と光の真ん中らへん。  
(A starry sky and panorama of city lights is the light of the halfway mark.)

Eventually, you and I reached the top of the world, and realized that chasing rainbows would never lead to a pot of gold. Instead of that dream, a new one was created before our very eyes. From our viewpoint, we could not see people down below, and cars were tiny, flittering fireflies. Even that great bridge over the sea was reduced to a tiny streak of light. "Rainbow Bridge," they called it, but its colours were incomparable to the more ambient rainbow that was you. Miles below us, a conglomeration of more shining lights than I ever imagined could exist; in the distance one stood out above the rest. It was a glowing orange spire, Tokyo Tower, possibly piercing higher reaches of the sky than even you could, at the cost of colour which was nothing in comparison to yours.

Then I thought to look up. In a sky that was once blinded by the intensity of the lights from below, now shone a hundred million tiny stars. At first, I thought they were merely a reflection of the landbound ocean of lights, but their twinkle was unmistakable.

I counted constellations on one hand while my other pressed to the glass, as though reaching for everything that would soon slip away.

右手の中にある温もりは、いつか違う人を照らすでしょう。  
(The warmth I have in my right hand, someday it'll illuminate a different person.)

What comes up must, of course, go down. It was with a sigh of elation that we began our descent back into that glowing surface, distorted by your rainbow ridges and spokes as I peered through them.

Across the city, I saw another starburst of colour, and if I remember correctly when I look back, I saw you both on that first night when our destiny rained from the sky. I wondered how many years in the future I would have to go before I met that other, and shared my life story with it. For now, with you, it was incomprehensible. I clasped my hands together, lost deep in thought.

Perhaps the people flying within the other wheel were looking over the city at me, thinking the same things.

リズムが早くなりだす鼓動。君の名を叫ぶ心臓です。  
(The throbbing rhythm becomes faster. It's my heart screaming your name.)

Whereas ascension leaves one with anticipation and lust; the descent is its reflection in a warped mirror. We fell silent, subject to such emotions as wistfulness and longing, as we began the second half of the journey: our return to reality.

I could feel the pounding of my frenzied heart within me, in my chest, in my throat. The beating of that passionate muscle drowned out the wind from outside and quelled the voices around me--all but yours. I wanted nothing more than to fly forever with you, between the stars of heaven and earth. Yet I knew that I did not completely belong in your world. Only you, The Great Sky Wheel, were the one blessed with an eternal fate of slowly rotating, showing the world to us lesser beings who could not fly.

How many others did you share memories with, on that night alone? When you fly, do you feel that we become your wings or do you have wings of your own? Are you eternal? These questions and more, burned me from inside out.

約束交わさずに、いつかまた逢えるなんて魔法だろ？  
(By promises we can't exchange, shall we somehow magically meet again in time?)

Life is a journey, or rather, a journey is the same thing as being alive. Whenever my next one may be, in however many years, on that night I made the decision that I want you to be part of it. You, and that other like you, who at these moments I can call your twin but will never know for sure until we meet.

It is magic indeed that brought us together, for I never dreamed we would get to know each other like we did. Even your existence was a mere fantasy to me, or less than that, because before I saw you I could not guess that you were there at all.

And I promised that I would come back to you, even before we hit the ground and became nothing, yet I heard no promise in return and sometimes I wonder if you heard me, or if I even said anything at all.

ごめん、ありがとう、さようなら、言いたくない言葉しか出なそう。  
(I'm sorry, thank you, goodbye, only words I don't want to say seem to come out.)

I wished I could tell you how amazing you made me feel, how beautiful the sights were that you showed me--that you shared with me; that we saw together. Instead, those words that signified only an ending were dancing on the tip of my tongue.

I was sorry. Sorry that I belonged only to myself as much as you belong to yourself and everyone within you. Sorry that I couldn't bring myself to say anything more than what I didn't want to say and what you didn't need to hear.

Thank you. For showing me what I thought only birds and angels could believe in. For giving me a reason to look up when the sky became dark, hoping I could catch a glimpse or even a fleeting memory, of the stars I knew could never truly be buried.

And, farewell. Prematurely, yes, but I was never good at such things and once I saw the stars disappear and the fireflies become cars again and tiny specks become caterpillars that spinned cocoons and burst out as people, I knew our time would soon be over.

気が遠くなるほどの未来で、心が重くってうずくまる。  
(With the future so far it's overwhelming, my heart is heavy and cowers.)

Straining my neck, I could see people spilling out of the rainbow below us. I wondered what their thoughts were; what memories you implanted inside their hearts, but at the same time I was scared to find out or even consider that their experience would differ from mine. However, deep down, I knew it was true. No matter how many people chase a rainbow, each person ends up somewhere different, don't they?

I could not possibly fathom what insights into life you gave unto them, if any at all. Perhaps they did see the world, and perhaps they did meet heaven too and give it a name much more divine. Perhaps you did indeed lead them to the pot of gold they expected to find at the end of the glorious trail.

The only thing left for me to do was cast a final, melancholy look out into the city that only mere moments ago I dreamed was a sea.

永遠によく似た１０分間。その度、思うんだろう。  
(Eternity must have resembled a ten-minute interval. At that time, I'll be thinking.)

I could hear my thoughts ticking away like the steady metronome of a clock; counting down the seconds until I, too, would become one of those people with unsteady feet and upturned eyes. In the beginning there was eternity but it was destroyed by matters out of my hands, and even out of yours, the colourful god that you were. The city was already beginning to disappear into its own horizon, and as the two of us sunk into it together I wondered what the end felt like.

Not the end of colour nor the end of you and I, but the end of freedom. For never in my life had I felt as free as a bird as I did when we were at our highest. And similarly, never in my life had I saw my freedom slip away right before my eyes, as it did when we returned to our lowest.

Only you had shown me how to live and how to be free in a span of time comprehensible to the mind, but as the clock continued the steady rhythm of tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, I heard a creak and realized that the end to my eternity would arrive all too soon.

廻る、廻る、二人がほら夜に闇に光探す。  
(Turning, turning, look at us in the night, in the darkness, searching for light.)

At the end of a three-hundred-sixty degree rotation, we sat at the bottom of the wheel, and for the final seconds I once again used my own eyes to try to convey the world to you. As close as I could be to the darkness outside, I looked up, hoping to take in another glimpse of your rainbow-streaked framework, and not daring to think of the stars.

Instead, all I could see was the red roof over my head and a sky of black velvet, and couldn't bring myself to feel blessed that I had one or the other. What use is a roof when one enjoys the rain, and what beauty has the night sky when no stars shine within it?

Long before I realized I was able to tear my eyes from the scene beyond your window, I was stepping out of that red gondola and had my feet firmly planted on the ground I wished never to touch again. Turning back somehow, despite the onward flow of people, I cast a grateful look back at you. And I thanked you from the depths of my heart.

恋しい、愛しい、想うゆえに胸がひどく苦しい。  
(Darling, beloved, when I think of it my chest hurts heavily.)

It so happened that I was the last person to fly with you before your bedtime, and I'm sure now that I glanced over my shoulder at you with every distancing step I took. As though I expected you to follow me, although you were rooted into both the ground and the sky. But really, I was looking back to make sure you were okay and to comfort you if you were reaching out for me. What pained me the most was not that I was walking away, but that I saw the lights of your vibrant aura fading into nothing, one by one, colour by colour. Of course, you might think that it is selfish of me to believe that you would be a glowing God through all hours of the night, defying the stars, but that is indeed what I had hoped for.

I took a different route home. I reached you via a train flying over the great city of Tokyo, but as fate had it, that train was also sleeping by the time we parted. I took the subway. Just as well; I believe it could have been too much for me to peer through the darkness and not see your lights.

But when I look back now, that's just what I'm doing


End file.
